also the updates need to be substantial in content, you may do a lot of tidying up of coding and making things better, but if people don't see it, they not going care. They want to see a update and personally last update that I personally saw, was small.
My advice is to plan out chapters, and release each chapter of your story as an update, even if it takes 2 months, personally I prefer games that release an update every 2 months.
Signature wall of text incoming
I have to respectfully disagree with your comments on substantiality of the content, you don't seem to understand how much work it actually takes to make content like this, specifically for our game. There is a reason why the game graphics stands out a lot compared to others, its not because of different tooling only but because of all the extra work put into every single frame, each character in the game, the positions, sets, it's important to differentiate me, as a coder and Motkeyz as the artist. I am mostly the vocal person when it comes to f95 , explaining how things are and how my progress as programming goes, I can't always speak for Motkeyz, but both him and me are in similar situations and understand each other. I have many times explained that it is a tremendous amount of work that goes into a game like this and how much we both dedicate into developing the game. We work in two different worlds, he can show teasers and plan out scenes, I can't really do much than explain what kind of improvements that I make, because people have reported issues or requested features previously. Also I don't want to spoil the next update, so Motkeyz releases things as he see fit during the development cycle.
I have been a fan of many games here for over a year and followed their development, there are many games out there that barely does anything in months, they release every 1-2 months and add a few bug fixes, minimal adjustments, we don't work like that. We wholeheartedly sit and work on this project, and we have experience and skill too, it's not just spent trying to "figure things out" but we actually sit and do a tremendous amount of work.
You may think that the last release was little to you and I am sad that you think that, because we worked extremely hard for that, working more than full time on the project while working full time on our dayjobs, pretty much every day was work, work, sleep work work, sleep, no free time. And people don't understand this but its not only down to how much time you spend on a game,
People need a work-life balance to have a good creative output, and working two full time jobs that are on high levels is not what qualifies as peace of mind, you constantly have to juggle being a manager in the day. Motkeyz has been juggling like this for over a year, and I have been juggling like this since February, there is only a certain amount of time you can do this before shit really hits the fan. We're starting to reach that point for the last few months.
If I come home from a really hectic day of work, or a few days business trip with a drained brain, I won't be able to just come home, sit down and come up with the best possible solution to my current problem, or development, this goes for pretty much every person out there.
I recognize that a lot of creators live in low-income countries without a job or in a really poor job situation, and for them this is easy to transition to, even if their quality is shit or their support is low, in relative to where they live they can manage. They don't pay taxes, they don't care as long as they get paid.
We could never have done this project without pushing in our hard earned money into it, money from our day jobs, we could never continue this project right now without working our day jobs.
As the story and choices branch out more and more the content gets split up more and more between the paths. Last release was the biggest of the last few so far in terms of content, both in dialogue and in renders, and in things to do.
We already have it planned to split up the game in chapters, and this is the first chapter you are playing right now but calling each release differently, and working a little bit longer is not going to make any difference that you would notice.
Look at those patch notes and name me any game with a team of two that pull something like that off because I would like to see it for myself.
It's simple really, the game as we have today wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for motkeyz style of art, his ideas and the way we work together, our combined efforts, the hard earned money we put into it, the expertise and experience we have, the passion for the project, our dedication, our sacrifices.
The support we get so far means a tremendous amount to us, and we have a lot of dedicated fans, and a wonderful discord community, as well as wonderful people here on f95.
There's only two realistic ways this is going to go, and both of them are a possibility.
1. We get the option to work on this full time, and the quality will go up even more, we can keep our sanity and health.
2. We're going to just work on the project out of passion for as long a we have the energy to do so, and have to lower the pace substantially from what it is today, meaning that we can't really commit much time.
This game is not going to get abandoned, if people love this game so much and want to see frequent quality updates, talk about it, share it, support it with whatever you can, if you cant support us financially, that's fine, exposure and word of mouth is really important to us, spread the word, even a thing like using a signature, recommending it to others, making a review of the game, talk to any youtubers or bloggers that you know to review the game and potentially recommend it if they like it!
We listen to all of you, we read all your posts and feedback. We are here and on discord.
We can't do this alone, we need you guys, our fans.
Much love
/A
